


To Hell By My Own Route

by villavona



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, Angst and Humor, Fun Cowboy AU: NOW with ANGST, Horses, M/M, Saloons, Swordfighting, lowkey red dead redemption but then i got distracted, u know. the whole shebang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:27:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28628001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villavona/pseuds/villavona
Summary: Tsunade rounds on Sasuke. “What are you doing, Uchiha?”“The usual,” says Sasuke drily. He works as a bounty hunter when he needs the money. Mostly he doesn’t. Mostly he wanders across the Continent, searching for traces of Itachi. He’s been tracking him for years, with no luck. Most of the time Itachi seems like more of a ghost than Sasuke’s actual ghosts.“What’s the usual?” Naruto pipes up with interest.“Ongoing revenge quest,” says Tsunade irritably, waving her hand. Naruto’s eyes narrow subtly. Sasuke sends him his best feral murderer grin.Western AU!
Relationships: Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto
Comments: 7
Kudos: 59





	To Hell By My Own Route

**Author's Note:**

> This work contains a lot of swearing and drug and alcohol use. Also sex. Sorry, it's the (Snoop Dogg in California Gurls voice) Wild Wild West and anything goes. Kishimoto don't sue me thanks

Sasuke can hear the wolves baying distantly beyond the narrow circle of light thrown by his fire. His horse snorts nervously, shifting her feet. The pine needles rustle.

Another howl, drawn out and quavering with loneliness. The hairs stand up on the back of Sasuke’s neck, and he sits up, irritated. The sound is miles off, and the predawn light is already tinting the eastern horizon pink; there is no reason for fear.

He tosses another log on the fire anyway, enjoying the spray of sparks it tosses into the chilly morning air. He needs to take a trip to town soon for more supplies. He can get another load of pine wood before he heads down off the mountain, drop it by the old woman’s house while he’s there.

The clop of hooves sounds uphill from him, and Sasuke shifts one hand to the throwing knife strapped to his thigh. His sword is leaning against his bedroll, and there are two rifles on Shio’s saddle, but better not to appear too defensive. There is no sense in provoking a fight. He dislikes shedding unnecessary blood.

Sasuke watches implacably as the stranger pulls his horse to a halt twenty feet away from his little camp. It’s a good-looking horse, a pert brown mustang with a black mane. It tosses its head impatiently, tail switching back and forth. Shio’s ears prick with interest.

The sun is rising rapidly. Light spills over the horizon, touching gold on the nearest peaks. Maybe twenty minutes to full daylight. It must be around six. The fall days are only growing shorter. 

“Hi there,” the stranger calls, raising one gloved hand. “Mind if I cook breakfast on your fire?”

Sasuke doesn’t. It’s not an unusual thing to ask, this far off the beaten path. They’re about a full day’s hard ride from the nearest town. Most people up here are fur trapping, and are eager for even the brief social contact that sharing a campfire provides. Sasuke isn’t here for furs, and doesn’t particularly want to talk to strangers, but he doesn’t reject them if they approach him first. You never know when someone will drop information that you’re looking for.

The stranger swings down off his horse, loosens the bridle, and digs a couple cans out of his saddlebags. Beans and coffee; Sasuke would recognize those labels anywhere. He sits up from his bedroll, pulling up the hood of his heavy coat against the chill. Fur tickles his cheeks. 

The stranger practically bounds over to the campfire. He’s not actually skipping, but it’s a near thing. Sasuke regards him with mild interest.

“Hiya,” says the stranger, peeling off his gloves. They’re old, worn leather. Actually, everything this guy has appears to be old and worn. His coat, heavy and knee-length like Sasuke’s, is fraying at the hem. “Uzumaki Naruto. I’ve been trapping up on the peak. Beaver mostly, but it’s not the season yet. I don’t mind. It’s the job I like, being on the move, and I can sell enough to make it back out here most of the year. You here for fur?”

“No,” says Sasuke. The stranger—Uzumaki Naruto—beams at him, apparently not put off by his minimal response. He pulls his hat off his head, revealing an abundance of spiky blonde hair that he scrubs one hand through, fluffing it out of its flattened hat shape.

He grins at Sasuke. He looks ridiculously cheery, for being awake at six on a cold morning in the middle of nowhere. “Do you like coffee?”

Sasuke opens his mouth to respond, but Uzumaki Naruto continues undeterred. “I’ll make enough for two, and if you don’t want it I’ll never say no to a cup of coffee. Main thing I miss, way out here. It’s when I run low on coffee and instant noodles that I have to start making my way back to town. This here’s my last beans, and I finished the ramen last night.” He’s plopped down on his ass by the fire, legs kicked out to either side like he’s not planning on standing up anytime soon. One foot is unconsciously tapping out a quick rhythm. “It’s nowhere near as good as the real restaurant ramen back home, but I don’t go there too often if I can help it.”

“Why not?” Sasuke asks when he can get a word in edgewise. The smell of brewing coffee wafts off the fire. Rich, better coffee than what Sasuke’s got. That alone makes this chatty company worth it.

Uzumaki Naruto glances up at him. “You could say it’s not the most welcoming place for me. They don’t exactly adore me in Konoha.” He snorts. “Jury’s out on everywhere else.”

He hands over a steaming cup of coffee, and Sasuke takes it gratefully. The heat of the tin mug warms his bare hands instantly.

“I know something about that,” he offers.

Uzumaki Naruto smiles at him, more subdued than his beaming grin, like they’re in on a secret together. “Yeah, well, what can you do? At least we can run off up here. None of that nonsense up here. Blank slate and all that.” He’s cheery again, slurping black beans out of the can like it’s the only food he’s ever wanted.

Sasuke eyes him curiously, wondering if he’s telling the truth. The mountains don’t feel like a blank slate to Sasuke. They’re home, the home that his people were pushed into by the very Konoha this guy is from. And they’re a graveyard, holding the ghosts of every single relative Sasuke’s ever had but one. Someday soon, the last two Uchiha will die here, and all the Uchiha bones in the world will rest on these very slopes.

He drains the rest of his coffee in one go, ignoring the scalding temperature. He’s itching to go suddenly, to be on the way to something. He stands up abruptly.

Uzumaki Naruto blinks bemusedly up at him.

“Long ride to get to town today,” Sasuke says by way of explanation.

His companion’s face brightens instantly. “Oh, are you going to Furano?”

Sasuke grunts noncommittally.

Uzumaki Naruto apparently isn’t the sharpest, or he just doesn’t care, because he takes this as an enthusiastic yes.

“Me too!” he says brightly. “I’ll come with!”

Sasuke grunts again.

—

“You’re kidding me,” Sakura says flatly. “You two know each other?”

Sasuke ignores this question in favor of shooting back the rest of the whiskey in his glass.

Naruto, of course, is delighted by the question. “Sakura, you know—” He pauses, apparently just realizing that during the twelve-hour ride to Furano, he never learned Sasuke’s name. In contrast, Sasuke has learned Naruto’s name, favorite color (orange), favorite food (ramen), age (19, same as Sasuke), star sign (Libra; God knows what that means) and about a million stories of Naruto’s exploits in the wilderness. He hasn’t learned, to his mild frustration, why exactly Naruto is unwelcomed in Konoha, or anything really personal about him. 

Sakura turns a sardonic eye on Sasuke. “You didn’t even give him your name? Close-mouthed, Uchiha, even for you.”

“Didn’t need to,” Sasuke tells her drily. “He takes care of all the talking.”

Sakura rolls her eyes and tips more whiskey into his glass. “On the house, for bringing this idiot back. Naruto, meet Uchiha Sasuke.”

“Uchiha?” Naruto says, eyes narrowing slightly. Sasuke sighs internally. But Naruto just gives his head a little shake, and sticks out one hand. “It’s nice to actually meet you!”

“This is stupid,” says Sasuke. “We’ve spent all day together.”

“So? You can still shake my hand!” Naruto says. “We’re already friends!”

Sakura snorts. Sasuke drains his glass again, and puts his hand in Naruto’s. Naruto gives it a little squeeze and shoots him another one of those quiet conspiratorial smiles. Sasuke wonders if there’s a joke he’s not getting.

His cheeks are flushed, presumably from the whiskey, and he’s tired from being in the saddle all day. He shoves his stool back from the rickety table.

“Stopping in on the old lady?” Sakura asks briskly, rising from her own seat. Sasuke knows she’s been drinking for probably the whole eight hours since the saloon opened, and she hasn’t lost an ounce of composure. “If she won’t put you up come back here. I’ll give you the cot off the kitchen.”

“Dropping off her wood,” Sasuke answers. “Thanks, Haruno.”

Sakura cuffs him around the back of the head and tousles his hair affectionately. “Say goodbye this time before you leave town, moron.” She turns to Naruto. “Go with him. You can stand to say hi to Tsunade too.”

Naruto slings one arm around her shoulders and presses a quick kiss to her hair. Sakura shoves him away, stacks their dirty glasses and the mostly empty bottle of whiskey in her arms, and heads back behind the bar. 

“You know Granny Tsunade too?” Naruto asks as the saloon doors swing shut behind them.

Sasuke is already at the bottom of the wooden stairs, stroking his palm down Shio’s silky neck. The cool night air is welcome on his hot cheeks, and the quiet is soothing after the ruckus of the saloon.

Naruto sways a little coming down the stairs, and Sasuke reaches automatically for his arm to steady him. He puts one tanned hand on Shio’s neck for balance and meets Sasuke’s gaze, brow a little furrowed.

“Yeah,” Sasuke says, letting go of Naruto. “She’s helped me out before. I bring her fresh pinewood. She likes the smell.”

Tsunade let him crash at her house for two months after Itachi. Sasuke stumbled down out of the mountains, thirteen years old with a bullet in his shoulder and a knife wound in his thigh, and collapsed at the saloon doors. Tsunade still ran it back then, before Sakura was old enough to realize that she was drinking more than they were selling, and sent her off to the poker tables to take over the saloon herself. Sasuke had laid in a fevered daze in Tsunade’s cluttered back room for weeks on end, while in her sober moments she had stitched his body back together. She’d given him his first drink in those weeks, and sent him packing the minute he could ride a horse again.

He must be drunker than he’d realized, because he’s explained part of that out loud to Naruto, who’s listening with a serious intensity on his face. He sways again towards Sasuke, and Sasuke lays one hand flat on his chest, keeping him at bay.

“That,” Naruto begins, and pauses, frowning. “Sounds like Granny Tsunade. I’ve brought her Kakash’ when he’s gotten all fucked up.” He’s slurring a little, waving one hand to illustrate his point. The other is stroking Shio’s neck, gentle but firm, like it’s on its own agenda.

“Okay, then,” says Sasuke. “Let’s go see her.” He scrambles up onto Shio with a little less than his usual grace. Naruto gives him a massive smile and turns to haul himself onto his mustang, burying his face in her black mane. The horse snorts and tosses her head a little.

They pound on Tsunade’s door for a few minutes before a neighbor leans his head out his window and screams at them to shut the fuck up, no-good lowlife motherfuckers visiting an old lady at one in the goddamn morning, and can he get some fucking sleep?

Naruto turns to Sasuke with a look of such dramatic mock offense that Sasuke actually laughs out loud. 

“We wouldn’t HAVE to wake you up if this OLD BAT ever fucking LET US IN,” he hollers back, punctuating his sentence by beating his fists on the door. It flies open.

Tsunade’s bleary amber eyes peer irritably out at them both. “Uzumaki,” she drawls. “ _And_ the Uchiha brat. Must be my lucky fucking day. Is it urgent? I have a gentleman caller.”

“No, you don’t, old lady,” says Naruto rudely, shoving past her into her house. 

Tsunade regards Sasuke for a moment, while he very carefully does not fidget under her gaze, and then she sighs and stands aside, throwing the door open. “I hope you brought my goddamn pinewood.”

Inside, Naruto is inspecting the contents of the pantry.

“Brat,” says Tsunade. “If you touch my food supplies I’m tossing you out on your ass. Look, Uchiha doesn’t snoop. He has some goddamn manners.”

“Pass me some of that smoked salmon,” Sasuke says, peering over Naruto’s shoulder into the sparse cabinet. Naruto shakes with silent laughter. 

“ _Uchiha_ ,” Tsunade says in a deadly voice. Sasuke fishes the bottle of rum that Sakura sent them with out of his jacket pocket and hands it over. She narrows her eyes, but plucks it out of his hand anyway. “Thin fucking ice, kids.”

Naruto sidles past Sasuke and sort of falls into one of Tsunade’s beat-up wooden chairs, putting his chin on the kitchen table. “So what’s new, old lady?”

Sasuke learned a long time ago that nothing is ever really new with Tsunade. He doesn’t know if she has always been this way, or if something happened to trap her in the endless downward spiral she’s been in as long as he’s known her. She drinks, she gambles, she loses. Rinse and repeat. She told Sasuke once that she hates gambling, but that without the thrill of it she’d just lay down and die. In her sober moments she’s brilliant and efficient and the only doctor Sasuke would trust with his life, but it never lasts. Sakura told him in those first few months that there was something unbearable to Tsunade in the world, in her daily life as a saloon owner, that she both craved and loathed and needed to numb with liquor and poker.

“What’s it look like?” Tsunade growls, but Sasuke knows she’s not really mad. She’s pouring them both glasses of rum¬¬¬¬. He gives the room a once-over. Same furniture, same general disarray. The phonograph in the corner is gone. Debt collection, most likely. Tsunade sometimes pays her debts, when they send someone big enough that she can’t kick his ass. It doesn’t happen often.

She slides their glasses across the table to them. Sasuke catches his automatically. It’s good rum, the top-shelf one that no one in this podunk town can actually afford. Sakura is a bully, but she takes care of her people. She’s a lot like Tsunade, actually.

“Kid,” Tsunade rumbles. Sasuke looks up. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Naruto paying attention too. In another life, Tsunade could have been a general; even drunk, she commands attention. “When’s the last time you went to Konoha?”

Naruto makes a face. “Like eight months ago.”

Tsunade frowns. “Go make sure Kakashi’s still alive.” Naruto opens his mouth to argue, looking annoyed, and she glares at him. “You can spare a week, brat. The best trapping isn’t for another month anyway.” Naruto subsides sulkily.

She rounds on Sasuke. “What are you doing, Uchiha?”

“The usual,” says Sasuke drily. He works as a bounty hunter when he needs the money. Mostly he doesn’t. Mostly he wanders across the Continent, searching for traces of Itachi. He’s been tracking him for years, with no luck. Most of the time Itachi seems like more of a ghost than Sasuke’s actual ghosts.

When Sasuke first left Tsunade’s, he’d planned so clearly the next few years of his life. It seemed straightforward, a simple to-do list. Earn some money. Get better guns. Get a faster horse. Become the best sharpshooter in the West. Become the best swordfighter in the West. Learn to throw knives, axes, to kill someone with whatever tools you have on hand. He’s honed his skills at murder for six years, made himself into the best assassin on the Continent, and now he can’t find his quarry.

“What’s the usual?” Naruto pipes up with interest.

“Ongoing revenge quest,” says Tsunade irritably, waving her hand. Naruto’s eyes narrow subtly. Sasuke sends him his best feral murderer grin. “Great. So we’ve covered the news. Thanks for the wood, brat. Now you two can get the fuck out of my house.” She takes a pull straight from the rum bottle.

“You’re not even gonna thank him for the booze? Disrespectful, vieja,” Naruto says. Sasuke knows instantly he’s gotten them booted.

Tsunade’s palm comes down on the table with jarring force, and she says with calm, lethal fury, “Out.”

She chucks a book at Naruto’s head as they leave, making him yelp. Sasuke swipes it from the ground.

“ _Icha Icha Paradise_?” he says dubiously. “Is this porn?”

“It’s for Kakashi,” says Naruto, rubbing the back of his head and grimacing. “The author is wildly in love with her or something. She just gives them away.”

“Makes sense,” Sasuke says. “I knew you couldn’t read.”

Naruto promptly flips him off. Sasuke smirks.

By the time they get back to the saloon, it must be nearly three in the morning. Sasuke silently accepts that he’ll have to get a late start tomorrow. He’s so tired he could lay down right on the bar and sleep. Being in the sun all day, twelve hours in the saddle, four hours of drinking, and probably twenty straight hours of Naruto’s company are incredibly draining.

Sakura’s wiping down the bar with a grimy rag when they walk in. The saloon is mostly dead, a couple drunks passed out at the bar or their tables. Choji, the cook, is coaxing some soft song out of the ancient piano. Ino, the other bartender, is slumped wearily against his shoulder, massaging her feet.

Sakura looks up at them. “Let me guess,” she says. “You pissed her off and got yourselves kicked out.”

“Ah, don’t be like that, Sakura,” Naruto pleads. “She likes to be mad at me. If I couldn’t piss her off I’d be worried.”

Sasuke mentally raises his evaluation of Naruto’s intelligence. The most concerned he’s ever been about Tsunade was when she quit both the liquor and the gambling cold turkey, and lay unresponsive for almost a week in the dark back room, barely eating or drinking. Sakura couldn’t rouse her with pleas or threats, and it wasn’t until Sasuke went back in there and threw ice water on her that she finally opened dull eyes and croaked, “Get the fuck out of here before I make you, brat.”

Sakura rolls her eyes. “Okay, boys. Turns out the cot’s broken from when some idiot slept on it with a knife and ripped apart the whole canvas.” Naruto flushes and looks down. Sasuke snorts. “But I’m sure two such strong young men don’t mind sleeping on the floor.”

Her tone brooks no argument, and Sasuke’s too tired to make one anyway. The alcohol and exhaustion combined are fogging his brain to the point where he knows he won’t win. Plus, he’s slept in worse places.

They shuffle off to the room off the kitchen. It’s mostly a storage room, extra barstools, dusty bottles of booze, stacked cans of food. The broken cot is propped up against the wall, canvas sagging open.

Sasuke lies right down against the far wall and pulls his coat closer around him. The darkness is a balm on his tired eyes. He hears Naruto collapse on the floor nearby, and rolls over, palming a knife. You never know.

“Hey,” says Naruto tiredly. “Your boots smell like shit.”

“So don’t smell them.”

“They’re right in my face, dipshit.” 

“So flip over.”

Naruto grumbles. Silence, and then, “I can still smell them.”

“Sure that’s not you?” Sasuke asks tartly.

“Fuck off.”

There’s a heavy rustling, and then Naruto’s voice says, much closer to his ear, “Your breath smells like shit too.”

Sasuke opens his mouth and exhales forcefully in Naruto’s direction. “If you drool on me in your sleep I’ll kill you.”

“No, you won’t,” Naruto mutters sleepily. “You wouldn’t do that to me.”

Sasuke frowns and opens his mouth to retort that he would, and he will, and then stops. Naruto is already snoring next to him. 

Tonight, sleep comes quickly and easily to Sasuke.

—

He wakes up the next morning, and for an instant can’t remember where he is. The smell of browning butter is wafting in from the kitchen, like it used to at home in the late summers when his mother would throw open all the windows to let in the sun and the dry mountain air and fry pancakes in butter before they woke up. Itachi would roll over in their shared bed and poke Sasuke’s cheeks until he woke up, and they’d go swimming in the freezing river, lying on the sun-baked rocks like lizards to get warm.

Sasuke opens his eyes against the memory, ignoring the familiar wave of loss that rolls over him at the thought of their airy house and his mother’s laugh. The saloon storage room falls into his range of vision, and he remembers the day’s journey down to town, and Sakura, and Tsunade, and Naruto. 

A light snore sounds beside him, and Sasuke turns his head very slowly. Naruto is blissfully asleep, back turned to him. He’s still dead to the world. Light is spilling in the one window, but it feels early still, maybe seven or so.

Sasuke unfolds the arm that was under his head and rolls up off his side onto his elbow. He blinks, and feels his cheeks heat up instantly. His other arm is flung across Naruto’s body, and Naruto is holding his hand. 

He extricates his hand carefully, trying not to wake up Naruto. The air is chilly after the warmth of another body, and he pulls his hood back up again. 

In the kitchen, Choji is frying potatoes. He glances up when Sasuke trudges in, and starts serving him a breakfast. Sasuke accepts gratefully. Choji’s food is way better than his own cooking, which he’s been subsisting on for a few months now.

He inhales the fried egg and potatoes in about thirty seconds. Choji refills his bowl without comment. Sasuke polishes off this one too and washes up, splashing icy water from the spigot outside on his face. He wants to be long gone by the time Naruto wakes up, or he’ll be snared into another long day of chatter and constant company. And he’ll definitely blush, and it will be embarrassing. 

Shio isn’t outside where he hitched her the night before. He frowns, confused.

“Sasuke!” Sakura’s voice calls, and he looks up to see her leaning out her upper story window, elbows folded on the sill. Her hair is still loose from sleep, and she’s dressed in her threadbare white nightgown, the one she’s had for years. At thirteen, Sasuke thought that nightgown was about the hottest thing he’d ever seen, partly because Sakura was so different than the Uchiha girls he’d grown up around: curvier, meaner, more vibrant, none of the aristocratic beauty of his own family.

“I had Tenten put Shio in the stables,” she says, and Sasuke quickly pretends he wasn’t checking her out. “Sleep okay on the floor? Naruto didn’t bother you?”

Sasuke knows he’s blushing again, and gives a silent thanks to the shade from his hat’s wide brim. “I’ve slept worse.”

Sakura smirks. “Is that what the kids are saying?” she asks without missing a beat. “Ask Tenten where your shit is. I told her to check your tack too.”

“Thanks,” Sasuke says, already turning towards the stables.

“Bye, asshole!” Sakura shouts from upstairs. Sasuke lifts his hand in her general direction. He can hear Ino’s giggle float out from the window. He wonders if she’s moved into Sakura’s room permanently.

Tenten, the stable hand and Sakura’s general handyman, is cleaning his tack when he walks in. She looks up and grins at him. He’s always liked her; she’s an orphan too, a stray who Tsunade took in and pawned off to various tradesmen for training. She’s an excellent farrier, a competent veterinarian, a good drinking buddy, and a decent metalworker.

“Trimmed her hooves a little,” she says now, tossing him the bridle. “Everything looks fine. She’s a pretty one. Sakura told me I wasn’t allowed to steal her.”

“I’d have to kill you,” Sasuke deadpans. 

Tenten laughs. “I threw in a new saddle blanket too. Your old one was kinda fucked up.”

Sasuke tries to pay her, but she waves him off with claims that it’s on the house, which he doubts. The saloon is pretty close to the edge all the time, mostly because of the money suck that is Tsunade’s gambling addiction. He slips fifty bucks into Tenten’s tool belt pocket when she turns to hand him his saddle, the last of his most recent bounty money.

He stops by the sheriff’s office for a new bounty on the way out. The clerk takes one look at him—dark blue coat, black boots, knives strapped to his thighs, axe and pistol on his hips, sword and rifle slung on his back—and jerks his thumb toward the right-hand wall. “Bounties are right there.”

Sasuke scans the wall of posters and prices and comes to a dead stop.

Itachi’s face is staring back at him.

Six years of constructing his brother’s face from memories fall away in an instant. It’s unmistakably Itachi—Sasuke could pick him out of a lineup with one eye closed—an older, wearier, longer-haired Itachi. His face has lost its last baby fat, the roundness Sasuke remembers gone. The dark circles under his eyes have deepened, leaving permanent shadows on his face. He looks startlingly like their mother, high cheekbones, delicate features, straight black hair.

Sasuke reaches out and plucks the paper off the wall. His fingers are trembling slightly. The price on Itachi’s head is steep: a thousand dollars. His crimes are not listed, but he is wanted dead or alive. 

On the back is a sparse set of starting information: last seen just outside Konohagakure no Sato on September 16th. Wearing a long black jacket with red detailing. Traveling alone. Armed and dangerous. Rides a blue roan mustang with black trim.

He flips the poster back over. Itachi’s bottomless black eyes bore into his. He looks haunted to Sasuke, gaze fractured with a depth of grief and guilt. Or maybe Sasuke’s projecting.

_Wanted: Dead or Alive._ The night he murdered their parents, Itachi told him. _If you want to kill me, hate me. Curse me. Detest me._ And Sasuke has done so for years, has clung like a lifeline to the memory of his parents’ bodies, and his brother’s bloody hands. If he wants to kill Itachi—and he has to kill Itachi. It is his duty to the two dozen Uchiha ghosts that haunt the mountain. He wants to kill Itachi, so he has taught himself to hate his brother, the same way he taught himself to shoot and ride and kill. He always was a good student.

Well. It’s time. Sasuke rolls up the poster with quick, efficient movements, and sticks it in his belt. He doesn’t need to look at it again. Its entire contents are seared into his mind.

The ride to Konoha is long from here: four days even riding quickly. Sasuke can make it in half that, if he pushes Shio to her limit. But to arrive in Konoha, where Itachi might not even be, with a worn out horse—foolish.

Sasuke is not Itachi’s foolish little brother anymore. He will make the journey in three days. Shio is not the fastest horse he has ever ridden, but she has by far the most endurance. She can do it.

—

The journey is long. Furano lies in the elevated eastern foothills of the great western mountain range on the Continent, and Konoha is nearly at the southeast corner. 

On the first day, Sasuke covers almost the whole desert east of the mountains. He thinks of Itachi maybe a hundred times a day on average, but now it seems like he can’t look at anything in the world without thinking of his brother. It was Itachi who sat him down in front of the maps in their father’s trunk and pointed out to him the mountain ranges where they had made their home. Itachi had explained, patiently, that they were on the lee side of the mountains, where there was little rain because the clouds were held to the west by the sheer height of the range. The rain shadow, he had called it.

He halts Shio in the shade of a wizened tree, one of the few growing out of the desert scrubland. Directly east lie the salt flats of the altiplano, which he cannot cross with his current water supplies. He must head further south and then east, into the steppe that makes up the heart of the country.

He brushes down Shio carefully, gives her a light meal so she will not graze, and lets her drink her fill of water. She is tired, but he knows she has another two days’ ride in her. They have done it together before. He sleeps for maybe four hours, and blinks awake in the dry, searing dawn. The early fall in the desert is the hottest, most brutal part of the year. Sasuke’s very skin feels itchy and too tight from the withering air.

The steppes are his least favorite part of the Continent. Sasuke, like the other Uchiha before him, was born in Konoha. But when he was three they were pushed out, how and why he has never quite understood, and settled in the mountains, which had been the homes of their ancestors. 

The endless journey through the steppes is the only part that he remembers. Back then he was too small to walk all day with everyone else, but his father would not allow him to ride in the wagon with the cargo. Itachi, their mother, and their cousin Shisui traded off carrying him. It was monotonous, and Itachi, then aged ten, fought with their father almost constantly. Sasuke was never allowed to hear what about, but he remembers the taut line of Itachi’s wiry shoulders as he rode piggyback, the sweat that dripped down in a thin trickle between his shoulder blades, and their father’s face in profile, jaw set with fury. Sasuke had been too frightened to look at him, brave enough to sneak a glance only when he was safe on Itachi’s back.

On the third day, the steppes give way to rolling hills of forest, and the city of Konohagakure looms on the horizon. By late afternoon, he’s pulling Shio to a halt on one of the steep hills that flank the city, giving it a natural bulwark stronger than the man-made wall that defines the city limits. Through his binoculars, he can see the city going about its business. The metallic clanging of the streetcars reaches him even this far away.

Sasuke starts tucking away some of his more obvious weapons. Carrying a rifle and pistol is acceptable; literally bristling with your own personal arsenal is not. He leaves his favorite rifle and sword across his back, a single knife and a pistol on his belt. The rest goes tucked neatly under one of Shio’s saddlebags. It’s a familiar drill. 

The sun is starting to set back across the plain, turning the city red gold in its dying rays. It’s pretty, Sasuke will admit. 

Next steps are enter town, chat up bartenders, locals, sweet talk or threaten information out of anyone who has it, locate Itachi, and kill him. Easy-peasy. He trains his binoculars on the city gates. The few times he’s been to Konoha it’s been a pain in the ass; you either have to log your entry with the guards at the gate or sneak in. Sneaking in is relatively easy, and he does it on principle, but it’s still a pain in the ass.

There’s some kind of disturbance at the gates. A guard is prone on the ground, another one crouched over him. People are streaming away from the scene, horses wheeling away as if in slow motion. Sasuke pans further left, toward the gates themselves. Another body lies prone, and a figure in a red and black coat is crouched over it. Sasuke’s blood thrums with a sudden pulse of adrenaline. _Itachi._

He’s moving before he’s even aware of it, stowing the binoculars and vaulting onto Shio’s back in one swift movement. From this distance, he can see as if in minature the mess at the gate. As if drawn by a beacon, Itachi’s head turns unerringly towards him. He’s too far away for Sasuke to see his face, but he can feel his brother’s gaze on him anyway. He digs his heels into Shio and unslings the rifle from his back.

Itachi stands, slowly, and Sasuke could swear he smiles. And then, as Sasuke thunders down the slope toward him, he swings smoothly up onto his horse and sets off at full tilt away from Konoha, into the plains. Sasuke turns Shio just slightly, adjusts his course to cut off Itachi, and curls on her back like a jockey.

He gives Shio her full head, feeling her body stretch to its fullest length beneath him. Itachi’s blue roan is fast, but Shio is faster. It’s like she picks up the adrenaline coursing through Sasuke and feeds off it, hurtling across the grass faster than she’s ever run before. Tears sting Sasuke’s eyes from the speed and are whipped away instantly by the wind. He’s gaining on Itachi, every hoofbeat narrowing the gap in between them.

Itachi looks over his right shoulder. He’s curled on his own horse’s back, the wind whipping his straight black hair across his face. He looks completely blank, devoid of emotion, and Sasuke can’t keep from baring his teeth. He’s not more than fifty yards away on Itachi’s right flank, close enough to see the achingly familiar way Itachi moves with the horse, all tightly controlled grace. Ten years ago, this could have been one of their games, racing the ponies across the altiplano south of their home. 

Sasuke was faster then, too. He doubles the rein around his hands and leans so far forward Shio’s black mane whips his face. To his left, Itachi vanishes abruptly behind a rise.

Sasuke knows these steppes well; he learned to ride, really ride, from the people of these plains, the horse masters of the world. He spent months tearing across the waving grass on horseback, learning every dip and divot in the deceptively flat landscape. A mile outside of Konoha, three minutes at a full gallop, there is a narrow river which runs in its own small valley, dotted by sparse stands of poplars. They are coming up on it, and Itachi has just disappeared into its lower ground.

He pulls Shio up to a quick canter. She blows irritably, and he gives her neck an apologetic rub. Itachi won’t exit the far side of the river valley. He has seen that Sasuke’s horse is unquestionably faster than his, and that his best option will be to make a stand here. 

And deeper down, Sasuke suspects that a chase on horseback, when they can shoot at each other, is not what Itachi wants. Itachi is a talker, a manipulator, and he is supremely confident in his own skills. He will want to face Sasuke directly, to throw him off-balance.

He sees Itachi almost as soon as he enters the little grove of trees, sitting completely still on a rock by the river’s edge. He could be carved from stone if it weren’t for the wind lifting the edges of his jacket and his hair.

“Itachi,” he calls, sliding off Shio and sending her off with a slap to the haunches. This battle is between him and his brother, no other being. Itachi’s dark gaze snaps onto him with the force of a spotlight.

“Little brother,” Itachi says coldly. His voice has deepened, low and even like their father’s, but at the familiar tone Sasuke closes his eyes against the inexplicable prick of tears. He feels three again, three and five and seven like every single time he broke something or was disrespectful to their parents, and Itachi would correct him gently, _Little brother._

Itachi took that from him. He forces his eyes open. He decided a long time ago that he would be straight to the point when he finally met his brother again.

“I am here to kill you,” he says calmly. His nerves have faded. He can see it already, laying Itachi’s body on the ground of the mountain, and sitting down beside his brother’s corpse until they both become stone, and blow away into dust. All he has to do it make it a reality.

The corners of Itachi’s mouth twitch upwards. “Do you always announce your intent to murder someone?”

“Only when it is sure to happen,” Sasuke returns, drawing his sword. The slither of steel is loud in the quiet clearing.

“Bold words, little brother.” Itachi’s face is unreadable. He looks even more like their mother than he did in the wanted poster, as if he’s grown into her form in the years since he murdered her. His sword is half drawn, delicate fingers half grasping the hilt.

Sasuke decides that that’s enough conversation. There’s more he wants to say to Itachi, but it will have to wait till after the fight. Sword in his left hand and a long knife in his right, he approaches his brother.

Itachi rises to his full height on the rock, sword in both hands.

“You’ve grown, Sasuke,” he says, eyes narrowing. He’s descending his boulder regally, with slow, deliberate steps.

Sasuke lunges experimentally, sword flickering to the left and then the right of Itachi. “Nine years does that.”

Itachi blocks him gracefully, stepping under his guard for a strike at his side. Sasuke catches it on his knife and parries, forcing Itachi back a step. His brother whirls, ducking another knife strike, and slashes at his neck. Sasuke dodges, jabbing his sword at Itachi’s midsection. Itachi blocks, but not completely; Sasuke’s blade slices him in the side.

“First blood,” Itachi notes. “You’ve gotten better, Sasuke.” His voice is coldly condescending. 

Sasuke snarls. “Like you have the right—” Like they’re still boys, who spent their days hunting and fighting on their stupid mountain, learning how to shoot straighter and climb faster and spar better, Sasuke seven years younger and never able to catch up. His brother, his greatest teacher, his greatest competition.

The gall is astonishing, and he throws the knife end over end at Itachi. Itachi knocks it away like a baseball, but Sasuke is right behind it, attacking faster than he ever has before, blade flashing from side to side. Itachi is parrying him, but barely; Sasuke is gaining ground. Blood roars in his ears.

Itachi leaps nimbly back a pace, regaining his advantage. He’s still taller than Sasuke, infuriatingly, and his reach and his sword are both longer.

“Impressive,” he says. Only someone who knew him very well would be able to detect the breathlessness in his voice. “Father would be proud.”

Sasuke yells, incoherent with anger, and charges his brother. Their blades cross again. Steel rings out, echoing back from across the water. A bird shrills in alarm.

Itachi catches a strike on his sword, and for a moment they’re staring into each other’s eyes. Sasuke sees anew the emptiness of Itachi’s gaze, the complete lack of any emotion, hatred or otherwise. He’s just a mask. 

“Not yet,” Sasuke grits out. “But he will be.”

Itachi smiles at him, condescending. “Oh, little brother. Cocky, aren’t we?” His left hand flickers up, and pain explodes in Sasuke’s right shoulder. Itachi has stabbed him with a dagger.

“You _bastard,_ ” Sasuke says, backing away, sword extended toward Itachi. Warm blood is dripping down his right arm, and the tips of his fingers are going numb. He wrenches his focus away from the pain and back toward his brother. He’s left-handed. He can kill Itachi just fine with only his sword hand.

Itachi prowls toward him, lean and lithe. His steps are deliberate, inevitable; he hunts catlike, a mountain lion. Sasuke spits at him.

“You always were a sore loser, little brother,” Itachi says. “Say hello to Mother for me when you see her again.” He tilts his head to the side, so eerily like her, and smiles, with none of her warmth.

Sasuke has never hated him more. He growls, clenching his bloodied right hand, and attacks again. It’s so simple, a quick feint to the left followed by a strike to the right, the opposite of what an opponent would expect from a lefty swordsman with an injured right shoulder.

Incredibly, it works. Itachi goes left to block the feint, and finds the point of Sasuke’s sword at his throat from the other side. He goes still.

“Drop the sword,” Sasuke says, breathing hard.

Itachi tilts his chin up, away from Sasuke’s blade. He loosens his fingers slowly, and his sword drops onto the dirt.

“That was a good trick, little brother,” he says, and it almost sounds genuine. “Are you going to kill me now?”

Sasuke’s shoulder is throbbing. He tightens his left hand on the sword. “No,” he manages. “I want to know.”

“What do you want to know?” Itachi asks patiently, and God. How many times have they had this exchange before? How many times has Sasuke tugged on Itachi’s sleeve, waited for his big brother to lean down so he could whisper a question in his ear? How many times has Itachi answered him, that same patience in his voice, like his only purpose in the world was to explain things to Sasuke?

“I want to know why,” he says. He sounds ragged even to his own ears. “Why did you do it? Why—” He stops himself, because the next word that wants to come out is _brother._ He will not give Itachi that.

Itachi sighs. “I thought I told you this already, Sasuke.”

“To test yourself,” Sasuke mocks. “My ass. You had the whole world to test yourself against. Why your own family?”

Itachi turns his head slowly to face Sasuke. The sword point digs into the soft flesh of his throat, drawing blood. His eyes are so black it’s like staring into a well. “Is it possible,” he asks, drawing it out, “that you are not committed to killing me? Even now, you want me to have an acceptable explanation for the massacre of our family?”

Sasuke bares his teeth, digs the sword in a little deeper. His brother’s blood spills onto the steel. “No. You die today. I kill you. Today.”

Itachi closes his eyes. “Do it, then. The excuses of a condemned man are worthless.”

“You fucking monster,” Sasuke hisses. He’s gripping the sword so tightly his nails are digging into his own palm. “I hate you. I _hate_ you.”

“Then it should be easy to kill me,” Itachi says calmly. His eyes are still closed, his head tilted back. Sasuke can see, in his mind’s eye, years of images, Itachi standing in the sunrise with his face turned to the light, Itachi across the fire from him, leaning into its warmth, Itachi tipping his head back to catch snowflakes on his tongue, Itachi’s dark head bent over Sasuke’s chubby wrist, deft fingers gently wrapping a bandage around it.

“It will be,” he says stubbornly.

The sun has set completely during their fight, and the moon is illuminating the glade with silvery light. The birds have stopped shrieking. The only sounds are the nearby stream and Sasuke’s own ragged breathing. In, and out. In, and out. On the next breath, he will strike. His left arm is shaking. 

“No,” says Itachi. “You can’t do it.” And in one motion he strikes, swiping Sasuke’s feet out from under him, and rolls to one side, pulling a pistol from inside his jacket and training it on Sasuke. 

Sasuke, on his knees, sword in hand, gazes up at Itachi, and knows then that he had never won this fight. Itachi let himself be held up at swordpoint to goad Sasuke into killing him. And now there is nothing Sasuke can do. Itachi is wickedly fast, and all Sasuke’s guns are on Shio. 

Itachi stands in front of him whole, uninjured, armed, and if Sasuke didn’t know better he’d swear his brother looks sad. How foolish, to think he could do this with nothing but a knife and sword.

“Foolish little brother,” Itachi says, as if reading his mind. “You should have struck with the knife when I blocked your overhand sword strike. You could have done it then.”

Sasuke clamps his mouth shut. He will not beg. Itachi will at least kill him quickly, like he did with all their family.

“You lied to me,” Itachi says quietly. “You said I would die today, Sasuke.”

A gunshot. Sasuke doubles over, clutching his stomach. Itachi has shot him through the abdomen. Searing pain spreads through his gut, and he can feel blood gushing between his fingers. The smell of iron is thick, a physical prescense in his nose.

A blow to his temple knocks him flat on his back. Itachi has whacked him with the butt of the gun. His ears ring with the pain, and tears spill out from beneath tightly shut lids.

Itachi kicks the sword out of his hand, and as if from a very great distance, Sasuke feels his brother crouch at his side. He pries his right eye open to see Itachi’s face swimming in front of him, but his vision is blurring rapidly, and for a moment it’s his mother, and he feels a relief so profound he wants to weep.

“Ma,” he whispers, or tries to, but he can’t tell if his lips even move. He feels like he’s falling backwards down a deep hole, and Itachi seems very far away.

A hand on his cheek, gentle despite its rough calluses. His eye slips shut despite himself. His thoughts are sluggish.

“Sasuke,” Itachi’s voice says softly, real sorrow coating the words. “You should hate me, little brother. I wish you did.” A thumb strokes his cheekbone, below his eye, and Sasuke knows no more.

—

He struggles back to consciousness after God knows how long, to Shio’s warm tongue lapping his cheek.

He opens his right eye, and pain explodes through his head. He squeezes it shut again. It must be morning. The sun is warm on his skin. His head throbs, his shoulder throbs, his gut pulses with excruciating pain.

If he didn’t die in the night, he won’t die just yet. He can get—the only people nearby are in Konoha. He doesn’t know anyone in Konoha.

He knows an address right by Konoha, and exactly how to get there. Naruto—Naruto told it to him, while they were drinking in Sakura’s saloon, and Sasuke remembers it. To the right of the gates, outside the wall, go south for ten minutes. A house with an orange door.

He moves his left hand experimentally. Pain sears across his abdomen, and he grits his teeth. When the wave of agony recedes, he catches Shio’s bridle with two fingers. She whuffles at him affectionately. Her breath is warm on his cheek.

“Down, girl,” he croaks, tugging on the bridle with all the strength he can muster. It’s not much, but Shio is the best horse ever. She folds her knees under her, and lies next to him.

It takes everything Sasuke’s got to roll himself over and fling one leg over her back. His right arm is hanging completely limp, and opening his eye for more than an instant produces blinding torment. The left eye won’t open; he thinks it’s stuck shut with blood from his temple. His stomach is completely brutal. It feels like there’s a hot metal rod shoved directly through him.

Shio scrambles to her feet, and Sasuke clings on for dear life. The motion makes his head spin, and nauseating pain bloom in his whole body. When she’s standing, he tilts his head as far as he can to one side and vomits up everything in his stomach.

He slaps the reins weakly against her neck, and grits out, “Move out, girl.” Shio’s ears prick, and she starts forward at a slow jog. Sasuke buries his face in her mane, breathing in her familiar horsey scent. 

He must pass out on her back, because he blinks open one eye when they’re nearly at the gates, and tugs the right hand rein to turn Shio southwards. Ten minutes of agony later, and he sees through tear-blurred vision a house with an orange door. _Naruto_ , he thinks, and inexplicable relief swells in his chest. 

Shio clops up to the house. The door opens when she’s ten feet away from it, and a man with gray hair and a mask over his nose and mouth steps out, frowning. It’s not Naruto, is all Sasuke can think, and the despair of the realization saps the remaining strength from his limbs. He rolls off Shio, and logically landing on his side like that should hurt, but Sasuke’s already in such excruciating pain he barely feels it. The man’s gray eyebrows contract in a frown.

With a herculean effort, Sasuke rasps out, “Naruto.” It’s all he can think to say, but it does the trick; the man’s face, or what he can see of it, clears, and he steps forward, his one visible eye flicking critically over Sasuke’s wounds. He crouches, pressing two fingers to Sasuke’s neck, and Sasuke passes out again.

—

“—no fever yet, everything clean—if we can hit the five-day mark—”

“He hasn’t woken up?”

“Only for water. But not even totally lucid.”

“How long do you think—”

“Don’t know. Probably better if he doesn’t yet. Kid’s gonna be in a hell of a lot of pain.”

A dog’s toenails pitter-patter across the wood, and there’s a snorting of wet doggy breath in Sasuke’s ear. He doesn’t move. The last thing he remembers is Itachi—Itachi crouching beside him, and Sasuke’s whole body exploding into pain.

He sits bolt upright, breathing hard. Pain lances through his stomach, and he doubles over. His head is spinning.

The conversation in the other room stops abruptly, and someone bangs into the room where Sasuke is.

“Hey, he’s awake!” a voice shouts from way too close to him. And everything comes back to Sasuke in a rush—the house with the orange door, and the gray-haired man, and Naruto. Unmistakably Naruto. The shout hurts his aching head, and he presses a hand to his throbbing temple.

“Settle down,” says a mild, bored voice from the doorway. “He’s definitely concussed. Easy on the loud noises for a little while.”

Sasuke cracks his eyes open. Painful, but manageable.

Naruto is kneeling next to him, practically vibrating with joy. “You’re awake!” he whisper-shouts. “I was worried.” His hand darts out and squeezes Sasuke’s. His palm is cool and dry, rough calluses at the base of his fingers.

“Hi,” rasps Sasuke, and then, “Water?”

The man in the doorway, who Sasuke now sees is the masked guy with gray hair, tosses a leather-bound bottle to Naruto, who holds it to Sasuke’s lips. Sasuke is too thirsty to protest the babying.

He drains half the bottle in one go and pushes it away. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” says Naruto, rolling his eyes like it’s obvious. “So what the hell happened to you?”

“Naruto,” the mild reproach comes from the doorway. This must be Kakashi, who Naruto lives with when he’s in Konoha. Sasuke sees the bright colors of a book cover in his jeans pocket, and remembers drunkenly picking it from the frosty ground in Furano.

Kakashi pulls up a chair and sits near Sasuke, propping both elbows on his knees.

“You got pretty beat up,” he says, completely neutral. He’s younger than Sasuke had thought. Maybe his hair is naturally gray. There’s still a dark blue mask covering the bottom half of his face, and an eyepatch over his left eye. The visible third of his face looks friendly enough, but Sasuke can tell he’s being assessed. “Concussion, nasty gash on the temple, dagger in the shoulder, and bullet through the stomach. A whole lot of bruising and internal bleeding, probably from getting yourself here. And you fractured your wrist falling off that horse. I assume you know most of this already.”

“So he’ll heal, right?” Naruto breaks in.

Kakashi’s gaze flicks over to Naruto and steadily back to Sasuke. “He’ll heal. The gunshot missed all your vital organs. Your shoulder will take longer. Someone really wanted to fuck up your right arm. I give it one or two months till you’re mostly okay. But I’m not a doctor.”

“My doctor’s in Furano,” Sasuke says, pushing himself further upright. It hurts. 

“Yeah, Tsunade’s not coming down here,” Kakashi says flatly. “Every single trapper on the Continent is there right now at the poker tables, trying to get rich before the winter season. I don’t think your sob story will hold a candle to that kind of temptation.”

“You’re not there,” Sasuke says to Naruto. He’s a trapper, Sasuke remembers. Likes being on the move, up in the mountains.

Naruto’s sun-browned cheeks flush the smallest amount. “No.”

“Naruto will go get Tsunade in a week or so,” Kakashi interrupts. “In the meantime, you need to eat and sleep. You look like shit.”

—

Sasuke’s been injured before. That doesn’t make this easier. He should have remembered: Day three is when you snap. Day three is when you’re tired of swallowing painkillers or alcohol and you want to be awake again, but awake comes with a family-size serving of fucking agony. Day three is when your skin feels like it’s stretched over your bones wrong, when you itch for a different view, a different self, a working body. It’s when the reality of your own immobility smacks you right in the face and you realize you’re really down for the count, you’re not going anywhere under your own power for a good long time.

Sasuke fucking hates it. He loves to move. He’s spent almost a decade now without being stuck in any one place, hardly ever spending more than two nights in the same spot consecutively. And he loves running and climbing and swimming and hunting, the fierce joy of his own power and his own athleticism and his own skill.

“You want to go outside?” Naruto asks when he comes in for the third time that day and finds Sasuke still staring dully out the window.

Sasuke blinks away the tears of helpless rage that keep insistently crowding the corners of his eyes. “Can’t walk that far, if you haven’t noticed.” It’s all he can do to make it five feet to piss.

“Sure you can,” says Naruto cheerfully. “I’ll help you.”

Because Sasuke’s obviously on the edge of emotional collapse, this easy assertion makes a lump rise in his throat. He swallows hard. “Fine.” He’s being rude, but the alternative is an explosion of this howling, frustrated fury that’s building up inside him. He’d rather Naruto think he’s an ungrateful asshole.

He sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. Even that motion makes his gut bloom into pain, and he takes a deep breath before levering himself up onto his feet. His legs tremble with weakness, and he growls bitterly.

Naruto slips up to his left side and pulls Sasuke’s left arm over his shoulders. He wraps his other arm around Sasuke’s waist, taking most of his weight. Sasuke grits his teeth and says nothing.

By the time they make it out back, Sasuke’s head is swimming, and he feels like he’s going to vomit again. Naruto basically carries him across the grass and deposits him on a convenient blanket to recover.

“Were you planning this?” Sasuke asks when he can talk again, smoothing the blanket with one hand. It’s soft.

Naruto grins sheepishly, one hand rubbing the back of his hair. “Yeah… you were starting to look kinda murderous in there. I figured a change of scene couldn’t hurt.”

Sasuke tries to stay angry, because nothing has functionally changed in his situation, but just being outside is improving his mood despite himself. There’s a massive cypress tree that gives feathery shade to the grass, and a bright pink bougainvillea vine decorating its trunk. It’s the kind of garden his mother dreamed of, limited as she was to the firs and pines of the mountains.

He figures he owes Naruto some conversation. “Thanks,” he says, probably still a little too bitchy. “I don’t like… being injured.”

Naruto snorts. “Yeah, buddy, I can tell.”

Sasuke thinks he’s being laughed at. He scowls.

Naruto throws a clump of grass at him. “Lighten up. Nobody likes being injured. You’ll heal.”

“I know,” says Sasuke tightly.

Naruto rolls his eyes and clambers to his feet. “I’m gonna clean up your room and get you lunch. Sit here and drink in the beauty of the natural world. And be nicer when I come back. It’s not me you’re mad at.”

He vanishes into the house. Sasuke knots his fists in the blanket, angry. Naruto can fuck right off with his _lighten up._ He’s not the one with a hole through him and a concussion so bad he can’t even focus his eyes properly, and it wasn’t his brother who fucking gave them to him.

“Kid,” says a voice, and Sasuke starts. Kakashi has crept up behind him somehow, soundless although he’s wearing cowboy boots and reading that stupid porn novel.

He eyes Kakashi warily. “Yes?”

The porn novel folds in half, and one grey eye crinkles in a fake smile. “I have a question.”

He sits down against the cypress tree, lighting a cigarette and kicking his feet out with a sigh. Sasuke waits silently.

Kakashi’s eye narrows appraisingly. “Are you going to go after Itachi again?”

Sasuke’s mouth drops open. He still hasn’t told them how he ended up injured. Naruto might have guessed or learned from Sakura that his revenge quest is against his brother, but even Sakura doesn’t mention Itachi’s name.

“How do you—” 

Kakashi waves a hand. “Know about Itachi? I know your whole family. I was a cop, and then I was in the secret police with Itachi during the war. And no, I haven’t seen him since.”

Sasuke stares. The war was right before his family left Konohagakure; the secret police he knows hardly anything about, only that Itachi was in them at age ten and their mother was furious about it. He grew up accustomed to the scars that it had left, namely the rift between Itachi and their father.

Kakashi’s slumped lazily against the tree like he hasn’t a care in the world, but his visible eye is shadowed, the same way Itachi looked when Sasuke asked about the war. “So, are you going to keep hunting him?”

The immediate answer that Sasuke comes up with is yes, because nothing has fundamentally changed. He just has to heal, become a better fighter, and then go after Itachi again. But when he thinks back to standing with his sword to Itachi’s throat, trying to land the finishing blow, his mind shrinks away from the idea. He doesn’t want to do that again. He grunts noncommittally.

In the same bored tone, Kakashi says, “Did you know you don’t have to?”

“Yes, I do,” says Sasuke instantly. He doesn’t know how, and doesn’t want to, express to Kakashi that this is a duty he owes to his family. That it is not possible for him to just let Itachi roam free after murdering two dozen Uchiha in cold blood.

Kakashi blows smoke thoughtfully through his mask. He lights another cigarette of the tip of his own, and passes it to Sasuke. “I don’t think that you do. Your family is already dead. They will still be dead if you kill Itachi.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Sasuke snaps. “You want me to just let him live? How am I supposed to do that?”

Kakashi shrugs. “You could try.”

Sasuke purses his lips and looks away. He doesn’t want to fight with Kakashi. The guy is putting him up for free, has spent hours cleaning Sasuke’s wounds and feeding him and making sure he doesn’t die in the night. And there’s a flicker of violence to Kakashi that puts Sasuke on edge. If he was good enough to be in the secret police with Itachi… Sasuke doesn’t want to push it.

“I have to,” he says stubbornly. “He killed my mother in front of me. In cold blood.”

Kakashi stands swiftly, grinding the butt of his cigarette under one heel. “Yeah. He’s already taken your whole life, your whole family away from you. You don’t have to give him the rest of your life too.”

He ambles away, pulling the porn novel back out of his pocket and burying his nose in it. Sasuke takes a long drag of his cigarette.

It is not as if he’s never questioned this before. He’s wondered if he should bother. He’s wondered if he’s still just following Itachi’s orders, a decade later. He’s watched other people live their lives, without the burden of avenging their families, but as if through glass, like zoo specimens. He has never really bothered to think that that could be his life, if he simply chose to forego his goal. It has never been an option, and everyone he knows has accepted that without question. 

But here is Kakashi, saying, _You could try._ Saying, _You don’t have to give him the rest of your life,_ as if killing Itachi is something done not for Sasuke, but for his brother. Sasuke tips his head back to blow a long plume of smoke heavenwards.

—

Five or so days later they decide that Sasuke can probably make it to Tsunade without dying en route, and he and Naruto set out on horseback. It’ll take another five days, since Sasuke would probably pass out at the breakneck pace he set last time, which apparently is just enough time for the last trappers to clear out and Tsunade to sober up. 

Kakashi hands Sasuke a pack of cigarettes, a load of smoked meat, and a sword, since Sasuke’s is presumably still lying in the river valley outside Konoha. It’s better quality than Sasuke’s old one, slightly longer, and with initials engraved in the hilt: HK and HS. The balance of it is perfect. Kakashi must have been an incredible swordsman.

Sasuke looks up at him, disbelieving. They haven’t really spoken since their talk under the cypress, but Sasuke knows he’s being watched closely. “You can’t give me this.”

Kakashi’s eye crinkles in what might actually be a real smile. “Don’t tell me what to do, Uchiha. I do what I want.”

Sasuke traces the letters etched into the metal, reading aloud. “HS?”

“My father,” says Kakashi mildly.

“You want to give me this?” Sasuke says dubiously. “You’ve only known me a week.”

Kakashi lays one hand on the top of his head. “Yes. But I think I know you. You’ll know what to do with it.” He messes up Sasuke’s hair for emphasis.

Sasuke ducks out of the way, torn between feeling flattered and annoyed that he’s apparently so easy to read. He climbs onto his horse, ignoring the heat of pain in his belly and shoulder, and they move out. 

The journey is manageable. His stomach feels better, and he can walk more or less a normal amount, but his head is stubbornly refusing to heal. He gets dizzy with quick movement, and Naruto still wakes him up every few hours in the night so he won’t die in his sleep. Even thinking and concentrating feel harder, like his brain is wrapped in cotton. 

Their last night, Sasuke opens his eyes to a clear, starry sky. Naruto is stretched on his side across the embers of the fire, watching him with liquid blue eyes.

Sasuke rolls over to his stomach and says, “I don’t think I’m gonna go into a coma. We could both sleep through the night.”

Naruto smiles with half his mouth, like the whole thing would be too much effort. “But then we’d miss all this.” He waves a hand expressively, and Sasuke notices the flask resting against his forearm.

“Are you drunk?”

“Nah,” Naruto says. “I was just cold. And I wanted to try this bourbon before Tsunade gets ahold of it.” Sasuke reaches out for the flask, but Naruto frowns. “I don’t think you should drink with your head bashed in.” His eyes light up. “But I have a better idea anyway.”

Sasuke used to smoke weed a lot more than he does these days, back when he ran around bounty hunting with Suigetsu and Juugo and Karin. Karin was into nature and meditation or whatever, Juugo smoked to calm down after he got brutal for a difficult bounty, and Suigetsu would go along with whatever the rest of them were doing. Sasuke never minded it; it gave them all something to do besides bicker around the fire. 

He and Naruto share a joint, mostly in silence. Sasuke appreciates this, that despite Naruto’s incessant chatter, he doesn’t expect Sasuke to actually converse with him. Karin was always on his ass about being so sullen.

The weed is good, and it’s been a long time since Sasuke last smoked. Half a joint makes the pain in his skull ebb, and makes the starry canopy above seem all the more infinite.

“Your brother,” Naruto says, and stops.

Sasuke looks over at him. They’ve both stretched out on their backs, heads close to the fire to smoke. 

“My brother,” he says back. And then, because it feels like Naruto should know, “Itachi.”

Naruto blinks slowly, long dark lashes sweeping his tan cheeks. He’s all golden in the firelight, blonde hair gilded with the liquid, flickering light still sputtering out of the ashes. “You didn’t kill him.”

“No,” Sasuke agrees. “He said… I didn’t hate him enough.” He remembers dying, bleeding from three separate places under the poplars, and Itachi’s hand incongruously gentle on his cheek. _You should hate me more, little brother._

He has been living so long for one truth: he wants to kill Itachi. His defining thought, the drive behind leaving Tsunade, bounty hunting, abandoning Karin & Co., roaming the Continent. A life goal he has never been able to see beyond. He’s never even bothered to think about what he would do after he kills Itachi. There is nothing else for him in this world. He had never considered that he might fail in his duty.

He’s been avoiding the thought of this, the reality that he had what he wanted and simply could not do it. He has no doubt that Itachi would have let himself be killed. Had Sasuke been able to do it, had he not lingered those long moments in the moonlit clearing, Itachi would be dead this minute. But Sasuke had waited. He had hated Itachi for years, and yet.

“Sasuke,” Naruto singsongs dreamily, like he’s been calling Sasuke’s name. “What are you thinking about?”

“I think,” Sasuke says, and his chest aches with the realization of it, the immense sorrow and grief that somehow, all these years later, he’s still stricken by. The taste of blood and bile fills his mouth, and he says quietly, the words ashes on his tongue, “He’s still my big brother. I still… I still love him.”

“That’s allowed,” says Naruto simply.

Sasuke shakes his head, closes his eyes against the dizziness from the motion. “It’s not. My family—”

“Is dead,” Naruto interrupts, and he rolls up onto his elbow so he’s leaning into Sasuke’s space. “You’re still alive. You’re only 19. You have a whole life. Live it.” His eyes are smoldering reddish in the reflected light of the glowing embers. He smells like aftershave and the dry desert wind and wood smoke, heady and alluring. Sasuke stares at him, and wants suddenly, viscerally, to be closer to him, to feel the broad muscles in Naruto’s back, his callused hands.

Naruto’s eyes narrow, and he shifts closer to Sasuke, letting out a little sigh. His breath ghosts over Sasuke’s cheek, hot after the cold desert air, and then they’re kissing, Naruto’s mouth soft and wet on Sasuke’s chapped lips.

Naruto rolls over further, bracketing Sasuke with his arms, and Sasuke arches up toward him, needing suddenly to be touched, to feel the heavy pressure of Naruto’s body against him. The power of him, the coil of his thick muscles, so different than any woman Sasuke’s fucked, even different than Suigetsu’s narrow shoulders and wiry strength. It makes Sasuke’s head spin. Naruto’s skin is fever-hot and dry, and Sasuke tugs on his jacket, wanting it off.

Naruto pulls away, eyes dark and huge. He’s panting, hair mussed up, cheeks flushed. Sasuke groans in annoyance and laces his fingers through messy blonde hair, pulling him back down. 

“Wait,” Naruto pants. “You’re—you sure?”

“Yes,” Sasuke says insistently, “yes, _idiot_ —”

A grin spreads across Naruto’s face, half unadulterated joy and half devious, and he pulls off his jacket, followed by his shirt, and then Sasuke’s, and leans down to kiss him again. They fuck right there by the fire, and it’s sort of tender, sensual for all they’re lying on the bare dirt in the middle of nowhere.

Naruto sits up after, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. There’s a smudge of dirt on his cheek, and he looks a mess, hair in every direction, mouth red and swollen and wet. The corner of his mouth shines, with spit or cum Sasuke can’t tell. He reaches up and thumbs it away without thinking. Naruto’s lips are soft. He grins at Sasuke.

—

They ride into Furano early that evening. The road is heavily marked with the passage of many hooves and wagons and footprints, but the town itself seems barely inhabited. The last trappers must have straggled out very recently.

Tsunade must have lost a lot of money to them. Her house bears a sign that says FORECLOSED across the front door. Naruto rips it off as they walk up. Tsunade never gets actually dispossessed of her house, but the bank must have foreclosed on her eight times over.

When they enter, Tsunade looks up at them with the manic grin that means she’s been gambling for too long and can’t snap out of it. “Hello, brats,” she says. “Got anything for me?” Her fingers are drumming restlessly on the table, and her leg is bouncing furiously. The whole table vibrates. 

Sasuke leans against the wall. He’s tired from not sleeping through the night, the day’s ride, and his stupid head is pounding again. He feels sick with weariness, physically frail, like all his bones might shatter if he pushes himself too hard.

Naruto sends him a concerned glance. “We need a doctor, old lady. Uchiha got beat up.”

Tsunade doesn’t entirely snap to attention, but something of the fervor goes out of her gaze. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Concussion, shot through the stomach, stabbed in the shoulder, fractured wrist,” Naruto reels off easily. “Can you fix him?”

Tsunade’s shoulders straighten with interest. “Shot and stabbed? Give me the booze from Kakashi, brat. I’ll patch him up.”

Naruto hands over the bourbon wordlessly. Tsunade takes it in a shaking hand and takes a swig, then another, and lets out a long breath. Visibly steadier, she waves Sasuke over.

He strips off his shirt for her inspection and lies down on her table, uncomfortably aware of Naruto’s eyes on him. They didn’t talk about their early morning desert hookup at all today, only rode and talked normally. But Sasuke thought about it, watching Naruto’s back move under his jacket, the easy way he maneuvered his horse. He caught Naruto staring at him, too, when they took a break and Sasuke was brushing Shio, singing in her ear to calm her down. He wants to do it again. He thinks Naruto probably does too.

“Yikes!” says Tsunade with gusto. “Who sewed you up?”

“Kakashi.”

“Tell him he did a shit job and he should have come up here to watch me do it,” Tsunade says to Naruto. “Just because he’s been on this table a million times doesn’t mean he knows how to be on the other side.”

Naruto snorts. “There’s about as much of a chance of Kakashi coming up here as you going down there.”

Tsunade ignores him. “Heads up, Uchiha. This is going to hurt like a bitch. Want me to knock you out?”

“Like, physically?” Sasuke asks. “No.”

“With morphine, idiot,” Tsunade barks. “Don’t get cute with me.”

“Also no,” Sasuke says.

“Have it your way, brat,” Tsunade says, and rebreaks his wrist without warning, then wrenches it back into place. Sasuke bites down so hard on his cheek his mouth fills with blood almost instantly, and tears well in his eyes.

“Old lady, he’s gonna bite through his tongue.” Naruto’s watching his face, eyes narrowed. Tsunade glances up.

“Stubborn bastard,” she observes without heat. “Naruto, knock him out for me.”

Naruto digs through a drawer somewhere above Sasuke’s head, muttering under his breath. He emerges into Sasuke’s line of vision, holding a syringe.

“Hold still,” he orders, wiping at Sasuke’s arm with a clean cloth. 

Sasuke catches his wrist. “Don’t.”

“Are you dumb?” Naruto hisses. “She’s gonna cut you open and you want to be _awake_?”

“I don’t like being knocked out,” Sasuke whispers back fiercely. “I can take it.”

Naruto’s jaw sets itself in a stubborn line. “She has to resew your guts, moron. No one can take that.”

Itachi could, Sasuke thinks, and snaps, “What’s it to you? I said I don’t want it.”

“Fuck you,” Naruto says with low fury. “I am not watching you get disemboweled awake. Why can’t you fucking trust me? I nurse you back to health and you’re asking me ‘what’s it to you?’ Have a little goddamn faith.” He’s glaring, eyes fiery with rage, but there’s real hurt lurking around the corners of his mouth.

The fight goes out of Sasuke, and he lets go of Naruto’s wrist.

“Thank you,” says Naruto, and slides the needle professionally into Sasuke’s forearm. “I’ll see you soon.” The world starts to recede almost immediately, and Sasuke slips into unconsciousness.

—

They stay at Tsunade’s for another three days, after which she declares them freeloading assholes and kicks them out, but it’s worth it. Sasuke feels better all over. His head is slow; the only thing Tsunade could do for that was make him an absolutely insane drug cocktail he’s not itching to try. But his arm is sewed and his wrist set, and his stomach is stitched back into normal order. He’s sore in a healing way, but he feels whole again, like he’s not struggling to keep his body together.

He thanks her, and means it. Tsunade rolls her eyes, but he can tell she’s pleased.

“You can show your gratitude by not almost dying again,” she tells him, arms folded across her chest. Sasuke tries not to look at her boobs.

“No promises,” he says.

Sakura’s come to see them off, with a whole bunch of nearly expired cans of food she doesn’t want to serve in the bar. She hands them to Naruto with an angelic smile.

“What are we, your garbage disposal?” he asks dramatically, pretending to stagger under the weight of the bag. “Jesus. Did you purchase in bulk by mistake?”

“No,” says Sakura sweetly. “ _Someone_ didn’t check the pantry and put in the whole order again because she thinks I can’t do my job.”

Naruto and Sasuke exchange a glance. It can only be Ino, but she’s not even here for Sakura to snipe at. Maybe they’ve broken up again. Ino is very devotedly in love with Sakura, but she’s also temperamental and jealous. Sakura is semi-regularly in love with Ino, but she also dislikes commitment and seems to compulsively need to piss Ino off. It’s a seemingly endless cycle of renewed love and breakups, but they both are apparently content with it.

It’s not Sasuke’s business, so he ignores Sakura’s barbs and swings fairly painlessly up onto Shio, who snorts and shifts her feet. Sakura catches her bridle, holding her in place.

“You wanna be a trapper now too, Uchiha?”

Sasuke actually doesn’t care about trapping and he doesn’t need the money, but Naruto basically roped him into coming up the mountain for the winter. Sasuke’s planning in the back of his head to ditch Naruto and go visit his childhood home, but he doesn’t mind making the journey up with company, especially company that smokes him out and is good in bed, which he knows from the past four nights in Tsunade’s back room. 

Naruto probably knows he won’t stay forever; neither of them has ever had the impression that their arrangement is anything other than temporary and convenient, and Sasuke’s caught Naruto’s blue eyes analyzing him sharply when the subject of their winter plans has come up.

“Yeah,” he says, tugging Shio away from Sakura. “Back in a few months.”

He can practically feel the force of Sakura’s derision at his back, but he ignores her. She’s mean today, prickly with the combination of her Ino drama and their departure, snapping with a false sweetness that conceals cutting scorn. She gets like this sometimes when Sasuke leaves or returns after a particularly long time. He puts up with it; he’s put her through worse.

All in all, it’s with a sigh of relief that they bid their goodbyes to Furano and head back up the mountain. The pines are already snapping with frost, and the ground is hard underfoot. Winter is upon them. 

“Not long till first snowfall,” Naruto observes. “When are you leaving?”

Sasuke turns around in his saddle to stare at him. “How did you know?”

“You’re not exactly subtle,” Naruto says drily. “I didn’t bring it up cuz I knew everyone else would give you shit.”

“Thanks,” says Sasuke grudgingly.

Naruto shrugs. “It’s not like I can stop you. And it’s not really worth arguing about.” His tone is odd, coolly detached. Naruto is never this flat and dispassionate; it’s like he’s borrowing the affect from Kakashi. Or Itachi. Or even Sasuke himself.

“Good,” Sasuke says, but it comes out hollow. He would have expected Naruto to fight, to lay out some impassioned argument about the idiocy of forging off on his own in the winter with his murderous brother out there. The lack of protest feels like a loss somehow.

“Good,” echoes Naruto, and they fall into silence again.

Sasuke realizes he never answered Naruto’s question. He was going to stay a couple weeks before leaving, but if Naruto isn’t going to convince him, he’s sure as hell not going to stick around to be ignored. 

He makes up his mind. He’ll stay the night and then take off at dawn. Whatever thing Naruto’s acting weird about, it doesn’t matter. They don’t owe each other anything.

They make dinner over a fire, canned beans and corn and a jack rabbit Naruto shot from horseback through the eye. Sasuke was impressed despite himself.

“Coffee?” he offers when they’ve demolished the food. He’s rummaging through the pack Sakura dumped on Naruto. “She gave us the good stuff.” She packed them a lot of good food too, even in her bitchiness. Sasuke feels a surge of warmth for her.

“Sure,” says Naruto easily. He’s laid on his side, legs crossed at the ankles, propped up on one elbow, the picture of cowboy relaxation. His hat brim is pulled low over his brow, shadowing his eyes.

Sasuke brews coffee, squatting on his heels by the fire. He hands Naruto his tin mug, the same mug Naruto first made him coffee in those weeks ago. Three weeks, really, but it feels like a long time. He’s spent more time with people in those three weeks than in the past two years combined. He’s fought Itachi, nearly died, fucked Naruto for an idyllic week, and now he has to start it all over again. He feels ancient just thinking about it.

Naruto sips his coffee contemplatively, staring into the fire. His expressive face is blank.

Sasuke wants him to snap out of it. This weird quiet Naruto is putting him on edge. “Don’t hurt yourself thinking, there.”

“That’d be you, idiot,” Naruto shoots back, but automatically, without any real intent.

“Wanna play cards?” says Sasuke. “Speed? Spades?”

This gets Naruto’s attention a little. “You can’t play spades with two.”

Little does he know. Sasuke used to play spades with his mother, on the occasional long afternoons that Itachi would be off with their father in the woods, learning some Uchiha secret Sasuke wasn’t yet old enough to hear. Her bread would be rising, and she’d make a small side loaf just for her and Sasuke to eat hot out of the oven. They’d devour the whole thing in minutes, yellow butter melting instantly on the thick slices. For once, the memory warms him. 

“Course you can,” he says loftily. “I used to play with my mother. Come on.”

Naruto starts a little at that for some reason, but he drains his coffee and sits up cross-legged. “Deal me in.”

Sasuke puts the stack of cards facedown in between them, and draws two. “No deal; we each keep drawing two and keeping one.”

Naruto’s eyebrows draw together in concentration. “We still take thirteen and bid?”

“Yeah.”

The game is simple, and Sasuke is really good at it. He learned how to count cards as a child; Tsunade tried to bring him in to the poker games when he was fourteen, and he got kicked out for counting cards. 

He spends most of this game watching Naruto, who’s frowning at his cards, tongue poking out the side of his mouth when he’s really focusing. The moon is rising higher in the night sky, and a sense of vague dread is pooling in the pit of Sasuke’s stomach. Each time he slaps a card down it’s a beat longer that he gets to sit here, prolonging the night before he must set out again to kill Itachi. 

Sasuke wins the first two hands, but Naruto bets nil on the last hand and makes the bet, winning him enough points to take the lead. He whoops in celebration.

“Take that, Uchiha,” he crows, and he’s finally grinning again, nearly wiggling with excitement. “Beaten at your own game. How does it feel?”

“Beginner’s luck,” Sasuke says loftily, internally relieved at the change in tone. “I can’t be slipping enough to lose to you.”

“ _Well_ ,” Naruto drawls, leaning triumphantly back on his elbows again. “As the winner, my prize is that you get to go get us more firewood for the night. Go on, get.” He makes a shooing motion with one hand, like one would a dog.

Sasuke rolls his eyes, but gets to his feet, grabbing a shotgun from Shio’s abandoned saddle. The horses are hitched to a tree five yards from the fire. Up here on the mountain, you have to remember your limits as a human. The mountain lions and grizzlies and wolves that roam here reign supreme, and it’s only fires and weapons that keep people and their horses alive.

Beyond the fire, it’s much colder, the air crisp enough with the night frost that it burns Sasuke’s nostrils. He yanks his fur-lined hood up with one hand, pulling his bandana up over his mouth and nose. He likes winter, the electricity of it, the struggle for survival in the harsh weather, but damn. It’s cold as shit. He always forgets. 

The wolves are baying again in the distance, probably six or seven miles away. Sasuke makes sure the shotgun is loaded, and gathers wood as quickly as possible, trying to pick the dried pieces on the forest floor. He has to set down the shotgun to hatchet apart a dead tree, and the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

He’s being stalked.

A mountain lion, probably. A bear he would smell, and a bear is not quiet. And they don’t hunt at night. So a mountain lion. Or a person. 

He ties the wood into a bundle, moving as fast as he can with his thick gloves, and slings it over one shoulder, picking up the shotgun again. He starts singing lustily, the first song that comes to his mind at top volume. It’s a song his mother used to sing in these woods, for the very same reason: _Coulda been the whiskey, coulda been the pills, coulda been the dream she was tryin’ to kill._ A sad song, but lively. Any sane mountain lion will be frightened by the noise.

He bursts back into camp at a jog, breathless and laughing from the cold and from singing. Naruto’s beaming at him again, a look of unfettered joy on his face. 

“You _sing_?” he demands.

“Mountain lion,” Sasuke gasps out, dropping the firewood at Naruto’s feet. “Trying to scare him away.”

“So you sang a little country ditty,” Naruto says gleefully. He starts untying the knot Sasuke put around the wood. “I bet he was intimidated as hell by your jilted love song. Damn, but you tied this tight. You better be able to untie it. That’s my rope.” He chucks the wood back at Sasuke.

“I serenaded him,” Sasuke says with dignity. “Your ungodly screech would have scared him off. I lulled him into forgetting to attack me.”

That one makes Naruto laugh, a real out-loud laugh. Sasuke crouches over the wood to hide his smile. “So you’d rather _seduce_ him than scare him away?”

Sasuke gives him his best wolfish grin. “It’s not him I’m interested in seducing.”

Naruto’s eyebrows shoot up comically. “Does that line usually work for you?”

Sasuke tosses another log on the fire and stalks over to Naruto, crowding into his space. If this is his last night as a human before he goes back to hunting his brother, he wants to end it with sex, and he wants it from Naruto, for whatever godforsaken reason he isn’t going to confront. “I don’t know. Is it working?”

Naruto rolls his eyes. “Work a little harder.”

Sasuke shoves Naruto, who overbalances backwards and catches himself on his elbows. Sasuke kneels over him, almost in his lap, and puts a hand on his chest.

“Jesus,” says Naruto. “Is this a seduction or a brawl?” His eyes dart down to Sasuke’s mouth, and he bites his lip.

Sasuke decides to ignore that comment, and leans in to kiss the corner of Naruto’s jaw. “I’m working harder.”

“It’s like a four out of ten right now,” says Naruto casually, and it’s a little insulting that he’s carrying on this level of running commentary when Sasuke is sucking a mark into the side of his neck. He starts unbuckling Naruto’s belt, and hears a sharp inhale of breath. “Fine. Five.”

“You’re being _fucking_ annoying,” Sasuke tells him, and takes Naruto’s dick in his mouth.

“You bring it out in me,” Naruto breathes, arching his back, tipping his head back. The long line of his neck is exposed, the same suntanned color as his arms and face. Sasuke wonders if he stripped Naruto bare, if all his miles of skin would be the same even tone everywhere.

He’s sucked dick before, and had his dick sucked: women in the random towns he passed through, men in Konohagakure. Suigetsu. He’s never going to say it aloud, but Naruto is his favorite. The taste of him, heady and intimate, the way he writhes under Sasuke’s mouth, the moans Sasuke can pull of out him.

Naruto fists one hand in his hair and pulls him off, panting. “Wait.” 

Sasuke flicks the tip of Naruto’s dick with his tongue, teasing. Naruto’s nails dig into his scalp, and the lean muscles of his belly flex. He swallows hard. 

“I said, wait,” accompanied by a sharp tug on Sasuke’s hair. 

Sasuke grins at him and waits, licking his lips. “Is it working yet?” he asks.

Naruto rolls his eyes again, but it’s sort of marred by the way his lashes flutter when Sasuke breathes hotly across his dick. “Can you come up here, please?”

“Thought you were enjoying that,” Sasuke says, but he crawls up anyway, straddling Naruto’s naked lap.

“I’ll enjoy this too,” Naruto tells him, and flips them over in one quick motion, settling between Sasuke’s legs. Sensation zings through Sasuke at the contact, and his eyes slide shut despite himself. Naruto bites his neck, just on the right side of too hard.

It’s a good thing Sasuke’s mostly healed, because Naruto has apparently decided to dispense with stupid ideas like slow and tender, and has skipped straight to fast and rough. It’d be a lie to say it doesn’t turn Sasuke on, being laid out on his back and pinned down, to be fingered open by Naruto on a winter night in the forest. The air is cold, but Sasuke’s sweating by the time Naruto finally pushes inside of him, pulling a moan out of him at the pleasure and the stretch.

He loses track time after that, especially when Naruto wraps one spit-slicked hand around his dick and starts jerking him off, too slowly in contrast to his fast thrusts. Sasuke arches up into his hand, pushes back to feel Naruto deeper inside of him. His world narrows to the feeling of Naruto’s dick inside him and Naruto’s hand on him, and the heat of pleasure burning through him. He knows he’s talking, equal parts moaning and insulting Naruto, egging him on, but he doesn’t care. And then all at once he’s coming harder than he ever has before, his whole body shaking. Naruto follows suit almost instantly, like he was waiting for Sasuke, or maybe it was Sasuke’s orgasm that pushed him over the edge.

“You’re fucking mean,” is the first thing he says after, dropping his head so his forehead rests lightly on Sasuke’s chest. His hairline is damp with sweat.

“Sorry,” says Sasuke, not meaning it. If it got him laid like that…

“No you’re not,” mutters Naruto, and pulls out with a bitten-off grunt, collapsing on his side next to Sasuke. His eyes are drowsy already. “Shit. That was good.”

“Just good?” says Sasuke, rolling over to grab a rag from his saddle and dampen it with his water bottle.

“ _Damn_ good,” Naruto says lazily. “I know you thought so too.” Sasuke glances over. He’s collapsed bonelessly on his back, one arm flung up across his eyes, naked but for his unbuttoned shirt, a little smile curving his lips.

Sasuke gives a hum of acknowledgment, cleaning himself up and hopping back into his jeans. He throws the rag at Naruto. It hits him with a wet slap in the chest.

“Ew,” says Naruto emphatically. “This is foul.” He grabs it anyway and wipes himself off, then hauls his own jeans back up. “What the hell did you do with my belt?”

Sasuke ignores this, wandering away to pee in the woods and then check on the horses before he sleeps. When he gets back, Naruto is curled up next to the fire, Sasuke’s favorite woven blanket tossed over him haphazardly. 

Sasuke has learned over the past week that Naruto is possibly the most talented sleeper he has ever known. Literally nothing wakes him, and he can fall asleep almost instantly in pretty much any position. So he just sort of shoves Naruto over to make space for himself, and pulls half the blanket over his legs. His winter jacket is cozy enough that he usually just bundles in that in the winter, but sharing a blanket is far superior, trapping the heat of Naruto’s body and warming them both.

He wakes in the early morning, when the first tendrils of light are peeking through the trees. Naruto is still sacked out at his side. Sasuke slips out from under the blanket. He can’t get it out from under Naruto, so he just leaves it there. If Naruto wakes, he’ll look at Sasuke with sleepy soft eyes and Sasuke will never be able to leave on his own. Better to lose the blanket.

He stuffs everything into his saddlebags, pulls up the hood of his coat, and unhitches Shio from the tree. She nickers at Naruto’s horse, who whuffles affectionately back at her. Sasuke has just swung up onto her back when he hears his name called from the fire. He freezes.

“Sasuke,” again, impatiently. Sasuke turns, dreading it.

“Come find me,” Naruto says. His face is blank, and his voice flat and bland again. “When you’re done with Itachi.”

Sasuke still has not figured out the _when you’re done with Itachi._ Even with Kakashi and Naruto’s urging, he cannot imagine it. He is wary of trying to imagine it, a life beyond his hunt.

He hates all over again this flatly unemotional Naruto, the jarring opposite of the warm, cheerfully argumentative trapper that rode into his camp three weeks ago. He doesn’t want to come find Naruto after Itachi, and find this blank indecipherable person staring back at him. He doesn’t want to leave Naruto and come back to find a reflection of himself.

But he can’t say any of that, so he just dips his head in acknowledgement, and wheels Shio away. If Naruto says anything else, it’s drowned out by the patter of her hooves. 

He makes northwest, a beeline to his childhood home. He has never been able to stay away for more than a few months. He was on his way there when he needed supplies and ran into Naruto. The pine forests ripple and wave him on his way, the sun coldly distant in the muted winter sky. He sniffs the air, inhales the sweet metallic tang of winter. The clouds are heavy and gray to the west; snow is coming. 

Sasuke lets out a long breath, relaxing into the familiar loneliness of the mountain. He’s back home, his home, the one place he belongs to just as much as the mountain lions and wolves and marmots.

When he reaches his family’s land, the temperature has dropped at least ten degrees, and his breath is visible in the clean air. It’s probably only four-thirty, but the sun is sinking behind the furthest peaks, bathing in a luxuriously rosy glow.

When the Uchiha family had been exiled from Konohagakure, they had returned to the homeland of their ancestors. This peak is Sasuke’s inheritance, where all his family, those he knew and those long before him, still rest.

They used to lay their dead to rest in one plot of land a mile south of their own living settlement, a village of the dead. When Itachi went mad and slaughtered every relative but Sasuke, the normal settlement too became a village of the dead. Sasuke was injured in two places, had not even pulled Itachi’s knife out of his thigh for fear he would bleed out. He was too weak and too small to take everyone to the usual village of the dead, so he gave his own small village to the dead. He could not dig two dozen graves, so he dug one large one in his own house. He laid everyone facing the east, like they had buried Shisui a month earlier, so that his soul would journey with the sun to the land of the dead. He covered the grave, and burned the house down. 

There would be no more Uchiha buried there. He would not give Itachi a proper burial, and there would be no one left to bury him. What he had always imagined, when he bothered to imagine it, was that he would kill Itachi, lay him on the cliff that faced the east, and die beside him, so that both their souls might find rest.

He pulls Shio to a halt on the cliff. She whinnies, like she always does at this spot, and the echoes bounce shrilly all around them, like there’s a herd of wild horses just out of sight. Shio whuffles as if she’s laughing. Sasuke rubs her neck absentmindedly. He will stay the night here, and then pass through his former home tomorrow. And then, he will start to track Itachi again. 

The sun dawns clear and golden across the eastern plains. Sasuke takes his time getting up, making a breakfast, coffee and all. It’s almost midday by the time he leaves the cliff. 

Twenty minutes ride north is his family’s home. He smells it before he sees it. His mother was not from these mountains. She had grown up further west, in the coastal ranges by the western sea, and she had brought redwood trees with her and planted them in her new home. They still grow, thicker and softer and redder than the pines and firs native to the slopes. Their scent is achingly familiar to Sasuke, etched into the very marrow of his bones from his childhood here.

The burned out house has collapsed slightly more since he was last here. A family of blue jays has made a home in one of the redwoods. Sasuke makes his rounds, talking aloud to Shio, who trots behind him like a loud, horsey shadow. He doesn’t pray anymore; he was raised to pray, but he has not since the massacre. There doesn’t seem to be a point in speaking to gods when his whole existence is so tied to one earthly goal. 

But he thinks about his family, with the familiar ache that time has barely lessened, memories with each of them. His father’s rare approval. His cousins’ laughter as they conspired together in whispers. His grandmother’s raunchy jokes. And his mother, making him laugh, sharing an inside joke across the dinner table, singing in the woods, teasing smiles even out of serious Itachi. 

Eventually he winds up back at the ruined house. He pours out a little of the whiskey he brought in a toast to the dead, and takes a swig with them. A ritual he must have made nearly fifty times by now.

It’s when he’s capped the whiskey and is standing at Shio’s side, about to remount, that he becomes aware of the same sensation he had last night, of being watched. But it’s noon, too early for a mountain lion. Something else is wrong.

The blue jays chitter above him, and Sasuke looks up at them. Their presence here is odd, too, in a dreamlike way he can’t put his finger on. There were never blue jays here before.

And then he knows, with a sudden thrill of fear, why not: because of the crows. Itachi’s crows, the birds he fed and tamed and seemed to speak to, in his odd way. Sasuke remembers being very small, and throwing a stick at one who hopped too close. The crows had gathered above him, angry and ready to strike. Itachi had come out from the house and whistled, and they had stopped, just like that.

There are no crows here now. There should be crows. They stayed, when the entire family was gone. They recognize Sasuke when he comes back, and follow him whenever he’s here. They should still be here. 

The hair rises on the back of Sasuke’s neck. The place is oddly silent without their caws, eerie in sudden normalcy.

“Where are they, girl?” he says to Shio. “They finally left, huh?”

She snorts, tossing her head. He lays his hand on her shoulder, feeling her muscles ripple beneath the warm fur.

“I guess we’re done here, girl,” he says. Pay your respects, maintain the graves, let the dead sleep. He swings up onto her back again, and she stands to attention, gathered and ready for motion under him. 

“Such a good girl,” he croons, and heads back to his cliff. The sun will set soon, and tomorrow morning Sasuke will head further west, to talk to trappers and rekindle the embers of Itachi’s trail. 

Shio’s ears prick as they approach the cliff, and her body tenses. Sasuke reins her to a halt. He’s learned to trust her instincts; she doesn’t spook easily, and her senses are a lot better than his. 

“What’s wrong, girl?” he whispers, leaning down over her neck. She’s transfixed by something ahead of them, her whole body leaning towards the cliff. Sasuke can’t see it for the trees, but he dismounts anyway. He’s quieter on foot.

He creeps up toward the treeline, and stops dead when he hears a voice from out on the bare rock. Naruto’s voice, shouting in anger.

“You no-good creepy-ass motherfucker,” Naruto rages. “I’m gonna cut out your fucking eyes, you piece of shit, you skinny little long-haired bastard!”

Sasuke straightens out of his prowl, rolling his eyes. Naruto, in a fight with another trapper on Sasuke’s goddamn cliff. Sasuke can find another place to spend the night tonight, away from the ghosts. He turns around to go back to Shio. A crow caws, stark and jarring, and then Itachi’s voice says with a hint of amusement, “I do not think you are in a position to be making threats.”

Sasuke’s blood freezes in his veins. Icy dread is coating his lungs. He can’t remember how to breathe. 

“I don’t think you’re in any position to be making threats,” Naruto mocks in a horrible furious voice that isn’t his. Sasuke’s never heard him sound so vicious. “I’ll make whatever fucking threats I want to, you evil son of a bitch.” 

Itachi doesn’t respond. Sasuke all at once remembers how to breathe, and creeps another fifteen feet forward to peer out from the tree line.

Itachi is stoking a fire very close to the dropoff, his face its usual mask of implacable calm. Naruto is beside him, sitting against a saddle. His hands are tied behind his back, his hat is missing, and he has a black eye. He spits at Itachi, face twisted with anger.

“Do I need to gag you?” Itachi asks mildly. “I have a long way to go and I’d rather you don’t keep this up.”

“I just bet you do,” Naruto growls. “Come gag me, you freak. I’ll bite your goddamn fingers off.”

Itachi rises from the fire, and turns toward the cliff, hands clasped behind his back. He gazes out east over the altiplano, and beyond, the grasslands. 

Sasuke creeps forward, gun drawn. Why Itachi has Naruto tied up he doesn’t know, but he’ll be damned if his brother gets to fuck with anyone else in his life. Naruto sees him, and his eyes go round with shock. His mouth clamps shut.

“Hello, Sasuke,” says Itachi without turning. “Visiting our family?” Naruto’s jaw drops. 

“Let him go,” says Sasuke in a low, deadly voice. His gun is steady on Itachi. “It’s me you want.”

“Like hell,” Naruto mutters.

Itachi says at the same time, “Actually, it isn’t, little brother. This has nothing to do with you.” He turns, finally, and Sasuke sees with shock the new gauntness of his face. His cheeks are flat, angular planes, cheekbones jutting sharply out. He’s eerily perfect, remotely beautiful, even more aristocratic than he was before, but he looks less human than ever. His eyes are huge in his slender face, boring into Sasuke’s. 

“What the hell?” says Sasuke, straightening up, keeping the revolver pointed at Itachi’s chest. No point in sneaking now. “You look terrible, Itachi.”

Itachi smiles, but it’s like a rictus of horror. Sasuke looks at him and can’t believe, suddenly, that this is the gentle, grave brother he once idolized. 

“Right?” Naruto taunts. “He looks like death. This is your _brother_? I guess we know who got the good genes.” His voice is still poisonous with fury, and Sasuke notices there’s blood leaking from the corner of his mouth.

“Ah,” says Itachi. “You know each other.”

“No,” Sasuke growls, at the same time as Naruto shouts, “Yes, you stupid fuck!”

The ghost of a smirk crosses Itachi’s face. “Sasuke, our affair can wait. I have business with your friend.” 

Sasuke assesses. Itachi is not even two feet from Naruto, and they’re both so close to the cliff’s edge that one misstep could send them over. He needs to be careful how he proceeds. Naruto is fiesty, but he’s also tied up and has clearly been beaten. Sasuke cannot count on his help.

“What business do you have with Naruto?” he asks.

“I am taking him to my boss to be killed,” says Itachi simply.

“Your _boss_?” Sasuke demands, and Itachi sighs.

“Sasuke, do you know who his father is?” It’s the tone he used to use when teaching Sasuke history, patient. It grates. Sasuke shakes his head. 

“Namikaze Minato,” says Itachi, like that means anything to Sasuke.

“What’s your point?” Naruto must be injured; his breathing is labored, like his ribs or his lungs are bruised.

“Namikaze Minato was instrumental in Konohagakure’s war force,” Itachi explains calmly. “He led the strike team that destroyed four hundred enemy troops in one night. It was me, him, and Hatake Kakashi, among others. He is dead, and I no longer kill for Konohagakure. But his son survives, and Hatake Kakashi survives. They will be killed to bring justice.”

“That’s moronic,” says Sasuke. “Since when do you take orders from someone else?” 

Itachi tilts his head to one side, mirroring his crows. “Are you not following my orders right now?”

“Back the fuck up,” Naruto interrupts. “You’re gonna kill Kakashi? I’ll rip your fucking head off.” He starts struggling again against his restraints.

Itachi watches him, looking almost sad. “You’re like him. Both of them.”

“Don’t talk to him,” Sasuke snaps, surprised by the force of the anger that rises in his chest at Itachi’s words. He pulls back the hammer of the revolver with his thumb.

The corners of Itachi’s mouth tilt up, and in one motion, he yanks Naruto to his feet, putting him between Sasuke and his own body. With the other hand he draws a gun, digging it into the underside of Naruto’s jaw, right where Sasuke was biting barely two days ago.

“Let us go, little brother,” he says flatly. “Or your boy dies.”

“Just shoot him,” Naruto snarls. The sun is setting at Sasuke’s back, and Naruto’s eyes glint red in its dying light. It’s getting colder, all their breath coming out in puffs of white.

“If I die, he dies,” says Itachi. His face is unreadable, but his eyes, too, reflect the red light. There’s a madness in them, something fractured. Itachi was always unflappably steady and assured, but this Itachi is different. He looks crazed with pain, so warped by the depth of suffering etched onto his face that he’s no longer himself.

“Wrong,” says Naruto coldly. “Just you.” He twists violently, digging his elbow into Itachi’s midsection, right where Sasuke’s sword bit into him. Itachi grunts, and Naruto brings the heel of his boot down hard on Itachi’s foot. Bone crunches, and Naruto throws himself to one side, rolling over his shoulder.

Sasuke sees it all as if in slow motion, sees Itachi’s face contort with pain and anger, sees his thumb prime his gun for shooting, trained on Naruto’s undefended back. He sees his shot open up, with Naruto out of the way.

He pulls the trigger.

The crack of the gunshot echoes like Shio’s whinny did yesterday, an army of revolvers firing. Itachi stumbles back, lifting his arm, but Sasuke’s shot was true. His gun falls limply from his hand. 

Itachi looks up at him, elegant brows drawing together. His lips form Sasuke’s name.

Sasuke stares. Itachi’s eyes slide shut, and slowly, gracefully, he falls backwards, arms outstretched, face lifted towards the sky as if he’s about to take off. His jacket billows around him, and his face is serene, nearly smiling. Sasuke shuts his eyes before his brother tumbles over the cliffside. 

A long while later, there’s the sound of an impact from down below.

Sasuke’s revolver falls from numb hands, clattering on the bare rock. He drops to his knees, shaking all over.

“Oh, shit,” he says aloud. “Oh _shit._ ” He tastes bile in his mouth, and swallows hard. He did it. He fucking killed Itachi.

He opens his eyes. Itachi was here, and then Sasuke pulled the trigger, and now he’s not. Sequential, steps one, two, and three. It’s so anticlimactic he almost wants to laugh.

Naruto’s staring at him, face unreadable. When Sasuke meets his eyes he seems to jolt, and blinks rapidly. His eyes are glassy.

“Well,” Naruto says, voice gravelly. “Wanna help me out of these ropes?” He lifts a shoulder demonstratively.

“Yeah,” Sasuke says. His own voice sounds the same. He climbs to his feet. The image of Itachi tipping over the cliff is seared into his brain with every blink.

The rope falls to the ground, and Naruto winces, rubbing the redness out of his wrists. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Sasuke says. He sounds robotic. He did it.

Naruto puts a gentle hand on his shoulder. Sasuke looks up at him. Naruto’s eyes are blue again, his face smoothed out of its alien rage and relapsed into familiar lines of concern. “Hey. You saved my life.”

“I killed him,” Sasuke says, not paying attention. “It was so easy.”

Naruto’s brow is furrowed. For once, he seems at a loss for words. “I kinda… well, I thought he was gonna kill me,” he says eventually, fingers probing his swollen eye gently. The white of it is blood-red. “He was good. I didn’t know how I was gonna get out of that one. Can we eat? Do you have any food?”

Sasuke does. They heat up a can of beans, make some wild rice, and gnaw on smoked salmon over Itachi’s fire. It’s a little weird, but they only have one horse between them, and they’re both too worn out to relocate on foot.

The immediacy of the meal brings Sasuke back to reality somehow. He hadn’t realized how hungry and cold he was until the food and the fire fix it.

Naruto tells him between bites that Itachi came upon the camp he’d made the night before, and tied him up in his sleep. The bruises—which include the black eye, probably ribs, his mouth, and one hip—are from fights with Itachi. His voice is hoarse from spending all day yelling obscenities. 

“He was very polite,” Naruto muses, tearing off a hunk of fish. “Didn’t use any force unless I fought him first, really. Told me he was real sorry about it but he did have a job to do. I can’t figure him out.”

“You and me both,” Sasuke grunts.

Naruto’s gaze focuses on him. “You know when you arrived at Kakashi’s, you had a bandage on you? We figured Itachi did it. Kakashi said he couldn’t make head or tail of it either, but that Itachi had always been a little. Intense.”

“Yeah,” says Sasuke. He’s not sure how to put his thoughts into words, or that he wants to, yet. The way Itachi had looked today… Lost, something broken in his face, and Sasuke had thought it was from a depth of grief and pain. And the way he had smiled when he was falling, the way he had given Sasuke the chance to kill him in the woods… He wanted to die, Sasuke is sure of it. What he can’t understand is why. 

“Coffee?” Naruto offers.

They spend the night there curled by the campfire, ostensibly huddling for warmth. But Sasuke keeps thinking of Itachi’s body down below, and the dozens of Uchiha ghosts nearby, and shaking, and Naruto’s heavy arms slung over him are the only things holding him together. He sleeps, eventually, and wakes up insanely cozy.

“Oh my god,” he says, shaking Naruto awake unceremoniously. “It’s snowing!”

They can’t lay in the snow forever or they’ll get frostbite, but the little hollow created by their bodies is so warm that it’s hard to get up. Little flurries are still coming down from the sky, settling on Naruto’s thick lashes. The world looks made anew, all the regular landscape transformed into something fresh and completely foreign. It’s like they’re the only two people in on the face of the earth, and it’s theirs to play in.

Sasuke chucks a handful of the powdery stuff at Naruto, who escalates instantly by tackling him into a thick drift in the shelter of a boulder. He hovers over Sasuke, grinning maniacally.

“Good morning,” says Sasuke breathlessly.

Naruto leans in and kisses him. His lips are warm, and he’s smiling against Sasuke’s mouth. His snowy lashes melt cold water onto Sasuke’s cheek.

Sasuke pushes him off, laughing. He knows it’s stupid and probably fucked up to feel this happy twelve hours after killing his only living family, but it’s like shedding a burden he didn’t even know he was carrying. He did it because Itachi was going to kill Naruto in front of him, and he could not have borne it. He feels lighter, like all the brilliance of the glittering snow has gotten into his blood too.

“You’re getting water on me,” he complains.

“You like it,” says Naruto evilly, crouching like he’s going to pounce. “You like ME.”

Sasuke can’t quite achieve the look of feigned disgust he’s going for. He throws another loose snowball at Naruto instead. “The fuck I do.”

Naruto laughs, and the echoes sing it back again, a hundred laughing Narutos in the winter sunshine. He’s so vibrant, bright blue eyes and tanned skin and all that riotous hair spilling everywhere. Sasuke feels like he was seeing in black and white before, and the world has snapped suddenly into color.

They pile onto Shio probably two hours later, Naruto’s arms snugly around Sasuke’s waist. Sasuke looks over his shoulder. He could go down to Itachi’s body, make sure his brother is at least facing east so his soul can rest. 

But he won’t. Itachi’s soul is not his responsibility anymore. Sasuke will see him in the land of the dead, but he’s not dead yet. He’s alive, on his own mountain, with Naruto, who doesn’t belong anywhere either. Naruto roams, too, and they have a lot of ground to cover. 

“Sasuke?” Naruto says. “Let’s go.” 

Sasuke touches his heels to Shio, and they set off southeast into the freshly made world.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I don't know the english word for altiplano. (is it high plain? way less cool sounding) No, i'm not gonna look it up.


End file.
